Hasta La Ideas

Kill time creatively with Amy Sedaris’ clever new book on crafting

If Carrie Bradshaw embodied the modern woman of the early 2000s, then Amy Sedaris (who made a few cameos on the show) might be just the clever lady to lead us out of the Great Recession and into the next decade. Along with her crack team of outfits and misfits, Sedaris’ new book on crafting assembles a host of DIY projects for “anybody who’s looking for a simple, creative way to kill a lot of time.” From crafting for Jesus to knowing your knack for knick-knacks, “Simple Times: Crafts for Poor People” details how, with just a few pennies, well-adjusted adults and those “hampered by a defective brain” alike can construct a fake candle or coconut bikini.

Fifteen chapters cover curious crafts like crab-claw roach clips and crepe-paper moccasins, along with practical insight like which kind of glue to use with different materials and how to avoid disasters like feather asphyxia. Amy Sedaris for president 2012.

Available November 2010, “Simple Times: Crafts for Poor People” pre-sells from Amazon.

Parse hop hop’s poetry with a book of dry interpretations

While most gets what Tupac meant when he rhymed, “I ain’t guilty ’cause, even though I sell rocks/It feels good puttin’ money in your mailbox” on his hit 1999 track “Dear Mama” (a song now included in the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry if you needed anymore proof of rap’s mainstream legitimacy), some rap lyrics are just downright baffling to anyone not pursuing a linguistics degree on the phenomenon of hyper-regional slang.

Seattle-based writer William Buckholz steps in with his book “Understand Rap: Explanations of Confusing Rap Lyrics You and Your Grandma Can Understand.” The result is exhaustive and seemingly in earnest, making for hilariously thorough explanations of double entendres in the same class as the Twitter stream English50cent.

The book’s chapters cover ten thematic categories; “Fashion” includes favorites like “Hockey players pagin’ me to practice on my wrist” (with so much diamond jewelry, my wrist is like an ice rink), while “Places” describes selling drugs on a particular street in Cleveland, OH with “Slang on the double nine,” and from “Insults” you get poetic gems like “Leave you kinda startled like the funk off of Fritos”—comparing an element of surprise with the unexpected pungent smell of the corn chips brand.

Great for giggling over with friends or an ideal gift for any student of lyrics, “Understand Rap” sells from Abrams and Amazon.

Fifteen years ago, Vincent Connare designed Comic Sans as a small software project for Microsoft. While designers cringe at the sight of it—the fun, whimsical font is one of the most popular fonts used today.

Jason Brubaker has compiled a solid list of reasons NOT to use comic sans that we have included below.

1. Just because it has “COMIC” in the name and it’s FREE doesn’t mean you should use it in your comic that you spent years laboring over. In fact, because it comes free on every computer in existence know to mankind, you might want to choose a different font for the sake of standing out from the massive crowd who blindly use it.

2. You will instantly look unprofessional to anyone who has already learned this lesson no matter how good your art or story may be. Designers and Letterers will want to roundhouse kick your face.

3. Comic Sans has uneven default kerning. Some letters are spaced weird which hurts the flow of reading. Below is an example of bad kerning. This is Comic Sans but I pushed the kerning so it was obvious to a non-letterer.

4. Comic Sans is an incomplete font when it comes to comics because it WASN’T really made for comics in the first place. For example, Comic Sans is missing breath marks which come before and after some sort of cough or sputter. (unless there is some special way of getting them I don’t know about.) Here is my own personal font with breath marks.

5. With many professional COMIC fonts, the lower and upper case letters are all capitals with a slight variation so that repeated letters can look somewhat random. Below is the same sentence with the top line in lowercase and the bottom in CAPITALS. Although the “I” stands out the most, they are all slightly different.

6. If you use the letter “I” with crossbars within a word, many letterers will want to drop kick you. In many comics the capital “I” with the crossbars is reserved for the personal pronoun only. Below is an example for clarity. Notice the “I” within the words “think” and “right”.

So which one is correct? That depends on who you ask. The majority agrees that the last one is correct. The top one is also fine. Some argue that “I’m” can be used either way and some argue that it should never have the crossbars unless the “I” is by itself. My main point here is Comic Sans only looks like the middle line which is by far the ugliest version.

7. Lettering is the one thing that people will stare directly at as they read your comic. Making it blend to your art is important. A badly chosen font will distract people from your work and story. Comic Sans will not only distract readers but get you hate mail. Good typography should be invisible. It shouldn’t call attention to itself unless there is a specific reason for it. Comic Sans will never be invisible because there is such a large group of people who hate it that you will most likely be hearing more comments about your font choice then anything else in your book.

Given the state of the world, we could all do with some levity. That’s where You and Me, The Royal We comes in. Conceived by Brooklyn studio mates Oliver Jeffers, Mac Premo and Aaron Ruff of Digby and Iona (which we featured here), the recently-launched collective’s cheeky sense of humor unites the line of seemingly disconnected products.

Poking a little fun at recent men’s fashion trends, the woodgrain belt and bark buckle ($90) makes an accessoire de rigueur for the aspiring urban lumberjack—naturally, the buckle is real bark. A boxed set of standard No. 2 pencils ($22) comes emblazoned with the phrase, “
This Machine Kills Fascists,” a nod to “This Land is Your Land” legend Woody Guthrie and making a great gift for folksy and literary types alike.

Oliver Jeffers’ hand drawn “Places on Earth” print ($180) comes with a box of 202 push-pins: one red (headquarters), one blue (next target) and 200 black (global domination).

And while we’ve seen letterpress cards make the rounds before (Alison Riley’s Stop Talking cards make a succinct point), the Royal We’s All Occasions cards ($36)—thank you, sorry and fuck you—provide options for, well, all occasions.